Not Being John Malkovich

January 26, 2009

Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common
comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is
not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at
Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie
America wants to see.’ ”.... At the close [of the marketing campaign for Oliver Stone's W., Lionsgate guru Tim] Palen wanted to run a new banner
ad on Internet ticketing sites and political blogs: “Sitting
President,” a photo that he’d taken of Brolin as Bush on the toilet,
posed like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Stone vetoed it: he was concerned
that Palen’s materials made his film seem giddy and trifling. “Josh on
the toilet, that one I didn’t go for,” the director told me.

“I
sympathize,” Palen told me. “Oliver Stone has the President taking a
shit—how disrespectful. But from the marketing perspective we needed
some teeth. Moritz Borman”—one of the film’s producers—“told
me, ‘I don’t want to know about “Sitting President,” and if Oliver
finds out and yells, I’m going to yell at you, too. But you have to do
it.’ ” So Palen did. And Stone didn’t find out. (Borman says that he
didn’t authorize the ad.)...

Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make
but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the
1982 “Gandhi.” Such considerations account for a big role being written
for Shia LaBeouf in the most recent “Indiana Jones” (to attract
youthful viewers as well as Harrison Ford’s aging fans). They also
account for the virtual absence from the screen of children between the
ages of newborn (when they appear briefly, to puke on the star for the
trailer) and that of the Macauley Culkin character in “Home Alone.” Why
have a four-year-old character, when one who is ten will prompt
ten-year-olds to find him “relatable,” and four-to-nine-year-olds to
look up to him? “If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability,
John Malkovich would be in every movie,” a top studio marketer says.
“Great actor, but not someone you want to see half-naked in the sheets
next to Angelina Jolie.”...

Executives’ testing stories take divergent paths to the same punch
line. Either they decided not to tamper with a “Pulp Fiction,” despite
testing results invariably described as “the lowest scores in the
studio’s history,” or they were confounded when an “Akeelah and the
Bee” faltered commercially despite “the highest scores in the studio’s
history.” In both scenarios, the numbers lied. “Testing is a sham,” one
marketing consultant says. “All you’ve learned is what people thought
of a movie they didn’t have to pay for. It does not mean they’re going
to go pay for it.”